Orbitsville Departure o-1

by Bob Shaw

  Even before they had time to collapse, Mathieu had passed them, silently flitting upwards like a great bat, and the incident was part of his past. He reached the fourth floor landing, opened the door and saw that the length of corridor separating him from the sanctuary of his office was empty. Concealing the gun in a fold of his jacket, he forced himself to walk at normal speed until the blue trapezoid of the office door loomed large enough Co receive him, then he turned the handle and went inside.

  "It's not like murder," he whispered to the uncomprehending walls, again seeing Cona Dallen and her son go down before him, knowing with a bleak certainty that the scene would play itself behind his eyes forever in an endless loop of recrimination. "It's not a bit like murder."

  Chapter 3

  "I hate to tell you this, Carry, but it looks like we got a bandit in 1990 Street."

  The voice from the transceiver in Dallen's ear came as an urgent, intimate whisper which shook him out of a reverie. Back on Orbitsville the idea of a three-year tour of duty on Earth had seemed valid, and not only because of the benefits to his promotion schedule. Earth, the home planet, had always had a romantic fascination for him, and working there was bound to give him a better opportunity to see it than any number of package tours. But the job was far from what he had expected, his wife was refusing to prolong her visit, and he had a yearning to be home again in Garamond City, breathing the diamond-pure air which rolled in from OrbitsviUe's endless savannahs. He was disconcerted by and ashamed of his homesickness, regarding it as an immature emotion, but it was with him all the time, only abating when something happened to break the daily routine…

  "Are you sure about this?" he said, taking the half-smoked pipe from his mouth and tapping it out on his heel. He was standing beside his car on Scottish Hill, a city park which gave extensive view's of Madison's southern and western suburbs. A brief rain shower had just passed over and he had been savouring the cleansed air. The museum section, which included 1990 Street, was less than four kilometres away and with unaided vision he could see the movement of traffic at some of its intersections, vapour-fuzzed glints of morning sun.

  "Pretty sure," replied Jim Mellor, his senior deputy, who was on duty in the downtown operations centre. Two of the new detectors picked up the remnants of a signal from a Lakes Arsenal product identity tag. Somebody has done his damndest to erase it, but enhancement of what's left indicates a TL37 fuse."

  "That means a small bomb."

  "Small enough to fit in your pocket — big enough to zap twenty or thirty people." Mellor quoted the figures without relish. "I don't like this, Carry. We've called in all patrols, but they're way out in the sticks and it's going to be twenty minutes before anybody shows."

  "Tell them to come in low and quiet, and to land at least a kilometre away from the Street — if our visitor sees any fliers he's likely to pop his cork." Dallen was getting into his car as he spoke. "Can you tell which way he's heading?"

  "He was sniffed out on the corner of Ninth, and then on Eighth. My guess is he'd heading for the Exhibition Centre itself. Going for the biggest number of casualties."

  "Naturally." Cursing the scant Metagov funding which forced him to monitor the region with inadequate resources, Dallen switched on the car's pulse-magnet engine and drove down the hill towards 1990 Street. Rumours that a show-piece terrorist attack was imminent had been circulating for weeks, ever since he had intercepted a group coming up from Cordele and two of its members had thed in the subsequent chase. He had given little regard to the stories, and even less to the refined versions which predicted an attempt on his own life, mainly because there was no special action he could take. His field force of sixteen officers was permanently overstretched, and now it looked as though a price might have to be paid.

  Speaking without moving his lips, purely for the benefit of the transceiver in his ear, Dallen said, "Are there many tourists in the museum sector?"

  "Not too many," Mellor replied. "Four or five hundred, and maybe a quarter of those are in the Exhibition Centre. Do you want me to start pulling them out?"

  "No! That could trigger the crazy bastard off quicker than anything. Can you get a new fix on his position?"

  "Sorry. There's practically no signal left in that fuse. It must have been a freak condition that let us pick it up on Eighth and Ninth, and I don't know if it'll happen anywhere else."

  "Okay, but keep me posted — Fm going to walk up 1990 Street from the Centre and see if I can spot him."

  There was a brief silence. "That's not part of your job, Carry."

  "I'll give myself a reprimand later." The car's engine whined in protest as Dallen angled it down the hill in a series of high-speed swerves, cleaving occasional puddles into silver spray, using the full width of each street and jolting over sidewalk corners where necessary. His knowledge that there was little risk of colliding with another vehicle and none at all of harming pedestrians gave him licence to drive in a manner which would have been unthinkably reckless in normal surroundings. From the air, the Scottish Hill district looked like an ordinary suburb, but all its houses and stores had been empty for decades, sealed by near-invisible plastic skins which proofed their structures against decay. Most of Madison City was similarly deserted, similarly preserved, with time switches bringing on the street and house lights at dusk for the benefit of families who had long since emigrated to the Big O.

  Reaching the edge of the museum district, Dallen turned the car into a cross-street and slowed down. He was less than a block away from 1990 Street itself and was entering the "living" sector of the permanent display. Solid images of cars and other vehicles — all of late 20th Century design — moved purposefully ahead of him, and seemingly real people in the costume of the period thronged the sidewalks and went in and out of stores.

  The images had been closely packed to create an impression of overcrowded city life on Earth three centuries earlier, before the discovery of Orbitsville. Stationary cars formed a continuous line on each side of the street, apparently leaving no room for Dallen to park, but he knew the illusion was the least of his problems. He drove directly into a resplendent white Cadillac, unable to prevent himself flinching in the instant when the front of his own car burrowed into the convincingly real bodywork of the larger vehicle and braked sharply. Sounds and smells of Madison circa 1990, accurately reproduced by hidden machines, enveloped him as he got out of the car and began walking north towards the next intersection.

  "Carry! 1 think we just got another whisper near the corner of 1990 and Third." The voice in Dallen's ear now had a discernible edge of nervousness. "He's getting too near the Exhibition Centre."

  "I'm on First, turning into 1990 two blocks east of him," Dallen responded. "Assuming we walk about the same speed, that means we should meet up near the corner of Second. It shouldn't be too hard to pick him out. "Him or her."

  "The masculine pronoun covers both genders — specially in this line of business. Aware that he had put too much effort into trying to sound pedantic and cool, Dallen brought his dunking into tighter focus. Isn’t the TL37 a dual-action fuse?"

  "Yeah — timer and impact," Mellor confirmed. "That means if you don't immobilise him real fast he's liable…"

  "1 know what it means, Jim. Dallen negotiated the remaining distance to the intersection, stepping around the animated solid images as though they were real people, partly from instinct and also because there was a sprinkling of tourists in the simulated crowd. In most cases he could identify holiday-makers by the current fashions of their clothing, but some liked to dress in period for their venture into 1990 Street and it could be quite difficult to distinguish them from holomorphs.

  He paused at the corner and took stock of his surroundings. A short distance to his right were the crystalline palisades of the Exhibition Centre; at successive intersections directly ahead were A. D. 2090 Street and A.D.2190 Street, each a recreation of its own historical era; and to his left were the seething perspectives of a Madison
City thoroughfare as it had looked three centuries earlier. And somewhere in that oppressive confusion of human beings and holomorphs there lurked a terrorist who was getting ready to ply his trade.

  Dallen's confidence wavered as it came to him that he did not even know if his quarry -was on the north or south side of the street. The images of the buses and commercial vehicles which jammed the central pavement were impenetrable to the eye, every bit as good as the real thing for providing an intruder with cover. Dallen slipped his right hand into the side pocket of his jacket and gripped the flat shape of his official sidearm. He rotated its beam control, setting the Weapon to emit a broad fen of energy. It was unlikely that he would get enough time for precise marksmanship, and rather than miss his target altogether it would be better to bring down half-a-dozen bystanders and let them denounce him while they recovered in hospital.

  "I'm walking east on 1990," he sub vocalised. "If I reach the corner of Second without making contact I'm going to assume the bandit is either near me or has got past me. Til wait thirty seconds then I'll say "off. As soon as I do that I want you to throw the switch and kill every image projector in the Street. That should take our visitor by surprise and give me a couple of seconds to pick him out."

  "Okay, Carry" Mellor said, "but suppose there's more than one."

  "It won't matter — Tin geared up to paralyse half the Street."

  Tm with you."

  "Be glad you aren't." Dallen moved tentatively along the block, grateful that fashions in men's casual clothing had varied little over the centuries. His tan jacket, slacks and open-necked shirt made a virtually timeless ensemble which enabled him to mingle unobtrusively with tourists and holomorphs alike. He kept to the outer edge of the sidewalk, trying to scan both sides of the Street at once. His task was made a little easier by the fact that he could remember some of its permanent, though insubstantial, residents. There was the newspaper seller at the entrance to the Clarence Hotel, the amiably tubby guard at the bank, the cigar store owner who grinned his idealised grin at passers-by. Figures who paused and spoke to them, obeying their programmes, were immediately identifiable as holomorphs, as were taxi drivers, delivery men and the tike.

  Dallen's real problem lay with strolling window-shoppers and sightseers. A couple walking hand-in-hand with two smalt children were likely to be flesh-and-blood tourists, but similar family groups had been included in the Street's cast of holomorphs to establish a homely atmosphere — and there was nothing to stop bombers adopting the same camouflage. By the time he reached the midpoint in the block Dallen's palms were sweating and his heart rate had climbed until there was a continuous fluttering agitation in the centre of his chest.

  He paused, striving to appear relaxed, and shielded his eyes from the sun. Business-suited men carrying leather briefcases hurried by him, a mailman with a sackful of letters, a green-shirted youngster conversing earnestly with a blonde in a pink dress, two adolescents eating cotton candy, an elderly woman laden with shopping bags…

  Tins is hopeless-, Dallen thought. And it's funny the way some people are making footprints and some aren't.

  Narrowing his eyes he picked out an area, some twenty paces ahead, where rain from the recent shower had accumulated in a depression in the sidewalk. The sun had already dried the surrounding concrete, with the result that people who walked through the shallow pool were leaving footprints for some distance on each side of it.

  Except for the holomorphs, of course — illusions don't get wet feet. Dallen frowned, wondering why his heartbeat had lapsed into powerful, measured anvil-blows. There was nothing surprising nor even particularly helpful about what he had noticed, and yet… and yet… Lips moving silently, Dallen turned and ran a few paces in the direction from which he had come, giving himself a second look at one batch of pedestrians. The crowd patterns had already changed, but he found the couple he wanted immediately. The man in the green shirt and the blonde woman were still engaged in what had seemed to be a serious conversation, but — Dallen saw the pair with new eyes — only the man was talking, and only the man was leaving fast-fading smears of moisture on the sidewalk.

  Dallen slowed abruptly, desperate for time in which to devise tactics, but his erratic movements brought him into near-collision with three women tourists in holiday shorts. They made little sound, a barely audible gasp of surprise, but it was enough. The green-shirted man glanced back at Dallen and began to run, dragging something from his hip pocket as he went.

  Dallen buried himself into pursuit, realised at once that another second was all the time the terrorist needed, and fired his sidearm through the material of his jacket. Several animated figures were caught in the cone of energy, but they were unaffected — holomorphs — and Dallen ran clean through them as he glimpsed the bomber angling forward, rigid and toppling.

  The fuse! The voice in Dallen's head had the hysterical shrillness of a speeded-up recording. How much impact will it stand?

  He overtook me falling man, damped an arm around him and used the momentum of his charge to carry them both into the narrow entrance of an electronics store. Antique television sets in the glazed display areas on each side glimmered with images of an earlier age. A middle-aged couple who had been inspecting the television sets backed off in alarm, the woman pressing a hand to her throat.

  "There's nothing to worry about," Dallen said, smiling a reassurance as he moved his right hand down the dead weight in his arms and gripped the metal cylinder which had been partially withdrawn from the bomber's pocket.

  "Say, what's going…?" The paunchy man broke off, looking doubtful, as the bomber made glottal clicking noises which indicated that his powers of speech would soon return. "Is that guy sick?"

  Dallen weighed the alternatives open to him. The orthodox course would be to produce identification, send the couple on their way and call for assistance. But handling the situation that way, legally and properly, would have an inevitable consequence — a near-complete victory for the terrorist infiltrator. It was almost certain that the bomb's timing device was set to explode it within minutes, which left the authorities with the choice of evacuating the Street and allowing the destruction to take place, or of risking lives in an attempt to fly the bomb to open ground. Either way, the news would go out with tachyonic speed, the message that Madison City was no longer a safe place for visitors. Dallen looked down at the face of the young man he was cradling in spurious intimacy, saw the mute loathing in his eyes, and felt the bleak uncompromising side of his own nature respond in kind. He renewed his smile for the benefit of the watching people.

  "Sick?" he said. "We should all afford to be so sick — young Joe here has just swallowed about a hundred monits' worth of happydust. He's got a habit of overdoing it."

  The woman's powdery face registered concern mingled with distaste. "Will he be all right?"

  "Right as rain, lady — it'll all come back up again any time now." Dallen eyed the couple ingenuously. "Can you lend me something to clean him up with? A handkerchief or a tissue or something." The sounds from the bomber's throat intensified, and Dallen patted his cheek with mock affection. "Sorry… we're late… our friends are…" The man took his wife's arm and walked her back out to the sidewalk where they promptly moved out of sight.

  Relieved to find that the incident had attracted no other spectators, Dallen transferred the cylindrical bomb to the safety of his own pocket, then manhandled the inert figure of his captive to the store's inner door. It swung open as soon as he pressed his badge to the lock. He quickly dragged his burden inside, handling the large man with an ease which came from regular strength training. The interior of the store, apart from the window display area, was empty and mouldering, a long cavern hung with cobwebs. A dank toadstool-smell polluted the air. Heading for a doorway at the for end, Dallen used the special whisper which would be audible only at his headquarters.

  "I’ve got him, Jim," he said. "We're in Cagle's television store in the one hundred block, and there was
no fuss — so play everything quiet and cool. Send a car to the rear of the premises, but tell the crew to wait outside in the alley till I call for them."

  Mellor spoke quickly. "What about the bomb?"

  "It's going to be defused."

  "Carry, you're not going to do something dumb, are you? There's no way to neutralise a TL37."

  There's one way, Dallen thought. "Radio reception is pretty bad in here, Jim. Can you pick up my…?" He made the lateral movement of his jaw which switched off the implanted transceiver, and — gouging irregular channels in the silted dust of the floor — dragged his captive into what had once been a square office. There was a flurry of movement in one corner as a grey shape disappeared into a hole in the skirting. Dallen swung the young man into a sitting position against a watt, pulled a billfold from the pocket of the green shin and scanned its contents.

  "Derek H. Beaumont," he announced. "You should have stayed at home in Cordele, young Derek."

  "You… should…" Beaumont's mouth contorted with the effort of speaking. "You should… go and…"

  "Don't say it," Dallen cut in. "That sort of talk is very uninspired — certainly not worth losing your front teeth over." He took his first considered look at his prisoner and was relieved to find himself reacting with an instinctive dislike which was going to make his task easier. Some of the raiders he had come up against in the past had been personable youngsters, physical models he could have chosen for his own son, but the impression he got from the man before him now was one of arrogance and stupidity. Dilute grey eyes regarded him from a pale oval face which lost rather man gained individuality from a down-curving moustache. The standard-issue Zapata moustache^ Dallen thought. Or maybe they've only got one, and they pass it around.

  "You better not touch me," Beaumont said.

  "I know — I've had hygiene lectures." Dallen took the cylindrical bomb from his pocket. "How many people were you hoping to kill with this?"